a
false position for settling anything. The Union may have been a
necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one,
and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeeded
in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we have
never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was a
Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our
vanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine
identification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an
Irishman if he figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figures
as an Irishman. So the Union has never even applied English laws to
Ireland, but only coercions and concessions both specially designed for
Ireland. From Pitt's time to our own this tottering alternation has
continued; from the time when the great O'Connell, with his monster
meetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic Emancipation to
the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it to
listen to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maintained by
blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of
special treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an
idealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized that
the freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and
may be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave,
in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearing
the opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight to
see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved to
be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man among
politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings,
and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, as
Parnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his
work rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against
Pitt, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels,
and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood,
shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald.

The effect on England was less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic.
Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, was
preeminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially a
realist about Englishmen